The year of my nan’s death, 2009, was the toughest year of my life. In the same month that I discovered she was terminally ill, a friend died very suddenly and my marriage broke up. During this period the sea became my solace and therapy, its hugeness dwarfing any feeling I had of lostness or fear for the future. The sea’s aim is always to make you feel better but never in an unrealistically flattering, emboldened, inspirational, Internet-quote way. When life turns against us in the modern world we often retreat into technology for some reassurance: a small virtual shoulder-rub from a stranger, often executed with the best of intentions but from a safe distance, confirming for thirty glorious seconds that the way we feel is all right. The sea doesn’t give us any of that; its approach is far more Tough Love. ‘My mind is heavy and troubled today,’ you’ll say to the sea. ‘Properly stare at me for a moment and get a grip on yourself,’ the sea will reply. ‘Do I honestly look like I care? I’m the fucking sea.’ It is inconceivably vaster than any of us, will still be here when we are gone – eventually drowning all that we once knew without a moment’s deliberation – and doesn’t care about our problems. Strangely this is often the biggest reassurance of all, especially in those moments of worry that derive directly from the delusion that as humans we are in some way important, which is ultimately all moments of worry, when you really think about it.
The nearest bit of coast – that belonging to north Suffolk – was just three quarters of an hour away from my house on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, but until then I’d made pitifully little use of it, not frequently enough thrown myself into its howling, flecked winds on the kind of January day that makes your gums throb, rarely done backstroke above its shifting shingle and let its rejuvenating salt seep into my scalp. Now I rapidly made up for that. If I felt anxious or creatively blocked or stymied by indecision or even euphoric, I often went to the sea. Over the next couple of years I traversed around 70 per cent of Suffolk’s coastline on foot, in all weathers. The summer of 2010 was one of the best of my life, and on the first warmish day of it I ran into the cold waves at full pelt, carelessly discarding clothes on my way, like a man in a bad film. It was only when I looked back to the shore that I realised the four friends I was with had not joined me and, moreover, clearly viewed what I had done as a minor act of insanity. But I felt comfortable with my actions. I knew this bit of sea now as a friend. Also, not to do what I had would have struck me as, well . . . a bit nesh.
How could I have not thought to bring my nan to these places in the years when she was well enough to come? I’d not grown up into the kind of person who would drive her to Chatsworth in a Lamborghini, or even, in fact, who had any awareness of what Lamborghinis themselves had grown up into, but surely I could have spared the time to at least drive her to Lowestoft in a second-hand Toyota Yaris? This is sad, but it’s merely my own version of a standard heartache of family life, experienced by people the world over in their various ways: you can spend your life very close to a relative but, due to the cruelty of time, in some areas of mutual interest still manage to miss them slightly, like two people who’ve entered the same forest on footpaths that come agonisingly close but never quite converge. All I could do in my situation was posthumously take my nan with me on my excursions to the sea, although to be frank this wasn’t hard since by this point I had become my nan in so many ways. My own nanness has only increased since then, and I feel that the part of the coast where I walk most frequently now, in Devon, is one that she would have liked even more than Suffolk’s. Would it be too bold to claim that it has those ‘best’ waves she told me I could hear through her shell when I was little? Perhaps, but it has certainly seen some very impressive, and historically very destructive, ones.
It’s always a little unfair to compare one unadorned example of nature to other unadorned example of nature, and to say that the craggy, towering, dog-bite coast of the South West Peninsula is better than the linear, eerie, ghost coast of East Anglia seems particularly harsh. It’s as harsh as comparing one large piece of really lovely cheese to a whole shop full of really lovely cheeses made by people with far more cows than the people who made the one large piece of really lovely cheese. There’s an awe to be experienced at the fact that two such dramatically different seascapes can exist on an island as small as this one, but there’s another kind of awe inspired by the diversity of terrain from the mouth of the Dart to the mouth of the Erme. Bigbury and Bantham, with their art deco island and sliced-tuna-steak cliffs. Bolt Head, which in sea mist is the closest the coastal West Country gets to Middle Earth. The stone steps precariously rounding Sharp Tor, which would befit the climactic battle scene of any great fantasy film and tower above the deep, folklore-charged Black Bull Hole: a passage named due
